209. Three Common Objections to ICBT 

 Welcome back OCD Warriors. Today we’re talking about three common objections to ICBT, so let’s get into it. Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing.

When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith.

I’m here to help you. Let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Number one that I often hear is, well, I’ve been told that ERP or Exposure and response prevention is the gold standard of treatment for OCD. Can I just tell you that I’m so tired of hearing that.

I’m so tired. I’m so done. I’m so over it. We’ve gotta stop saying that there is no one size fits all for OCD treatment. I have met many, many people struggling with OCD. Some of them need a little bit of DBT skills woven in because they just have no tolerance for any kind of emotional distress. I’ve met people who have had just very poor relationship skills.

They struggle in their family relationships. They struggle with boundaries, communication, assertiveness. I’ve met with people with trauma. His trauma is feeding into their OCD. We’ve got to stop acting like if OCD is the nail, then ERP is the hammer. I’m done. Now, this has been said many times over and over, and quite frankly, to throw them out on Front Street io.

CDF is responsible for a lot of this language. Now we know that there have been many, many studies done that have shown exposure and response prevention to be effective. We also know on the flip side. That ERP has a high dropout rate. It’s very difficult. I’ve talked with many of you who are looking for alternatives and who have done some ERP and really didn’t feel either that it was effective for you or didn’t feel like that was a road that you wanted to go down because of your spiritual beliefs and how exposing yourself to certain things did not align.

I do think there is a way to do ERP that’s spiritually and religiously sensitive and sound hats off to the many, many clinicians out there who are doing that. What happens when you tell someone that something is the gold standard of treatment? And then it doesn’t work for them or they don’t find it effective.

Creates a lot of hopelessness. It creates a lot of shame. It creates a lot of, what in the world is wrong with me? Because if this is the gold standard and I did the gold standard, then shouldn’t I be better? And so I really wish that they would adjust that language to say that people with OCD. Have complex things going on and they need to find possibly a blend of treatments that will work the best for their unique situation.

They’re coming from a good place because they want people to get evidence-based care, and I understand that and I do appreciate the promotion of evidence-based care, but I also know that people are people, they’re not study participants. Many, many of them are not study participants and many, many of them would not qualify for an OCD study due to the massive other things that they have going on in their life or in their clinical presentation.

I’ve talked about that on the podcast before, so I won’t be labor that point either. ICBT has also been researched. ICBT is being used by many clinicians. Are having great success, and I see this all the time, not only with my own clients and my own students, but from talking with other ICBT clinicians who have been able to help many, many individuals.

There is no one size fits all for OCD treatment, whoever you decide to seek help from, please make sure that they have the training and experience needed in OCD to be able to treat you. If you are going to seek, whether it’s E-R-P-I-C-B-T, or some other form of therapy, ask the questions, ask the hard questions.

Ask your therapist, what percentage of their caseload do they see? Who has OCD? Ask them what kinds of themes they’ve worked with, if that’s something that’s a concern for you, or how they might treat your particular theme. The second objection that I hear pretty frequently is people say, well, wait a minute.

I have a mental health condition and you’re telling me that I need to use my brain. To reason my way out of OCD, well, you have the ability in your everyday reasoning process to reason many different types of things. I have seen people who are struggling with OCD, who are incredibly successful. They’re problem solvers, they’re engineers, they’re in tech.

They’re doing just amazing things, super smart, and they have the ability to reason a variety of different ways. Yes, of course. Your brain has that ability to be able to change and shift the way that you’re thinking about things. That’s the beauty of neuroplasticity. Also, we know that there is a OCD way of thinking.

And an everyday reasoning process way of thinking that we talk about in Icbt. So people will say things to me like, yeah, and I do this and I have to do this compulsion because of this. And I’ll say like, I mean, I know it doesn’t make sense. I’m like, well, it does like in OCD world, it makes complete sense to me what you’re saying because I understand that obsessional reasoning process.

But we also know that we’re in everyday reasoning processes. All day long day where we are determining if situations are safe or not, and we’re not using those same rules that OCD uses. So the key thing is if you can start to recognize when you’re in a non obsessional reasoning process, like what’s the difference?

ICBT says you’re able to really trust your sense data of what’s happening. In the present, in the here and now without going into this land of imagination of all kinds of what if hypotheticals, and you do that on a day-to-day basis. When you get in your car, when you look both ways across the street when you go into a store or you’re kind of like scanning the environment, okay, there’s somebody over there that’s loitering or I’m not really sure what they’re doing, they’re kind of out of place.

Maybe I’ll just kind of walk the other direction. You might have had situations like that, I know I have, where you have to be on a little bit more high alert for your safety based on the location that you’re in or what you’re doing, and you’re able to use your sense data to determine that. There may be times where you’ve looked at packages of food and it was just very clear that for whatever reason it was spoiled.

You didn’t get to it fast enough in the refrigerator. Senses of sight and smell are able to tell you like, Hey, that food is not any good. What OCD does is it’ll read the tag on the package of chicken that says it expires tomorrow. And OCD will say something like, what if it actually expires today? And what if that means that there might be some harmful bacteria in this chicken and we could cook it all the way?

How do I know if it’s really done? It’s still may. Maybe it’s a little pink in the center. I might really need to look at like that’s the obsessional reasoning process versus just really trusting in your senses and not going into the land of futuristic thinking, I’m gonna be sick all of a sudden from this chicken, which is perfectly fine for me to cook in a normal, healthy way.

So yes, you do have the ability, even though this is a disorder that affects your thought process, you have the ability to think differently about it, to look at alternative narratives. The third objection that I hear about I ccbt is that it’s really just arguing with your ocd. That’s all you’re doing.

You’re saying, well. You’re writing some type of alternative narrative, and that’s just engaging with the Ooc D in a way that you shouldn’t, and you should just be disconnecting from that and being able to move towards your values or expose yourself to things that are scary. And we’re not arguing with OCD, we’re not saying that some of these things are not possible.

We are saying that not everything that’s possible is probable. OCD doesn’t really care if it’s a 0.0001% chance it will still convince you that this is going to happen. So we don’t worry as much about probability because many, many different things are probable. What we’re saying is what data do we have to show that is going to happen?

If we don’t have any data to show us that that’s going to happen, our real sensory information, then that’s not something that we need to be concerned about. It’ll almost be like saying that you’re preparing for a rainy day when it’s completely sunny outside and you look at the weather report, it looks like it’s gonna be sunny or maybe partially cloudy, and you say, well, I really need to put on my boots and my raincoat because theoretically it could potentially rain today.

What we’re doing with alternative narratives in I CCB t is we’re not trying to argue with the obsessional story. We’re not trying to say, oh, this alternative narrative, it’s right and the obsessional story, it’s wrong because that is too black and white in itself. There may be some genuine uncertainties that OCD latches onto and that makes things really confusing.

There are some things that you might not be able to know right now. Like for example, should I marry this person? Maybe you haven’t been dating them or knowing them long enough really to make some type of determination about that, but you could make some determinations about what you’ve seen in terms of how they act or their character.

If nothing else, you can make a determination about, yes, I wanna continue getting to know this person, or no, I don’t. But the general, like, where is this gonna go in the future? Might be a true uncertainty that you have to live with. And when we look at that alternative narrative, we’re just trying to like debunk the obsessional story as like the only story in your brain.

Like this is the only possibility of something that could happen. It’s almost a way of just being creative and expanding your mind to say, yeah, that could happen. Things could go terribly horrible, awful, and all of my deepest fears come true, or things actually could be okay. Maybe, I don’t know in this situation, but as Christians, we can rest and we can trust God.

That comes from knowing that God loves us, that God cares about us, that God has our best interests at heart. If you’re struggling with scrupulosity, those things may be really hard to grasp ahold of right now. That’s one of the reasons that I’m really trying to incorporate more and more tools for Christians in my online course Empowered Mind.

We are getting ready to start up on Monday, this kind of last call, if you wanna get in there and be involved, but I would love to have you. So you are all invited. If you’re just done kind of fighting with OCD and you’re unsure of what to do next, but maybe you’ve tried some different things and, and what you’ve tried hasn’t worked, I just encourage you to try ICBT to just go in.

I’ve yet to have a person who dropped out because they were absolutely terrified or just felt like they needed to avoid all the content. There’s a way to practicing with your particular theme, feels too scary or too daunting. You can certainly look at some other examples and practicing with maybe a past theme that you’ve been able to work through that doesn’t bother you anymore.

Or just a complete different story, something maybe that isn’t emotionally charged for you. So that’s one thing that I really love about it. You don’t have to necessarily use your own stuff in the beginning until you feel more comfortable and more confident in being able to apply the skills. One of the things that I really want to shake up, as I talked about in the beginning, is this idea that there is a one size fits all.

Really have to look at people as unique individuals, what their needs are, what they’re most struggling with, how things have worked or haven’t worked over time, and develop a solid plan for that. So I really encourage all of you to look at what your options are, but hopefully this episode helped you. I recognize or work through some objections that maybe you’ve had to engaging with Icbt, whether you are a clinician or a therapist listening.

Ultimately, your big question may be, will this work for me? Will this work for my particular theme? Will this work if other things haven’t worked for me in the past? In other words, is there any hope of me being able to develop some skills to deal with this ocd? As I always say, I believe that there is hope for you regardless of what you have been through or how severe things are looking right now.

This treatment has been shown to work across a variety of different themes. I feel like ICBT is great for scrupulosity because of the emphasis on identity and focusing on your true self versus this feared false self that OCD has convinced you that you are or you’re going to become if you don’t engage in compulsions.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian faith in OCD is a production of by the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.